[ The left and labor haven’t always seen eye to eye—but they
may be on the verge of a fruitful reunion. Could a new labor
movement—one not built or seen as the exclusive province of
working-class white men—reclaim power for workers across the board?]
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THE EMERGING COALITION THAT COULD REVITALIZE OUR POLITICS  
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Raina Lipsitz
October 20, 2023
The New Republic
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_ The left and labor haven’t always seen eye to eye—but they may
be on the verge of a fruitful reunion. Could a new labor
movement—one not built or seen as the exclusive province of
working-class white men—reclaim power for workers across the board?
_

Illustration by Michael Deforge / The New Republic,

 

Nearly 30 years ago, in 1996, Columbia University hosted
[[link removed]] a conference
[[link removed]] called
“The Fight for America’s Future: A Teach-in With the Labor
Movement.” Speakers included the feminist activist Betty Friedan,
historian Robin Kelley, and scholar Cornel West. John Sweeney, who had
recently been elected president of the AFL-CIO, was also in
attendance. Sweeney’s election was seen as a watershed moment for
organized labor; per _The New York Times_, it signaled
[[link removed]] “a
sharp turn toward militancy” and “moving women and minorities into
the policy-making ranks.”

Rosslyn Wuchinich, now the president of Unite Here Local 274 in
Philadelphia, was there. She described it as the start of a new
moment, one in which those interested in racial, economic, and gender
justice were “seeing the labor movement as a place that you could go
for real change.” The conference’s goal was to reinvigorate
organized labor by uniting with various social movements behind a
shared progressive agenda. Could a new labor movement—one not built
or seen as the exclusive province of working-class white men—reclaim
power for workers across the board?

Given overlapping climate, health, and social crises and the threat of
another Trump presidency, this question has taken on new urgency
today. Union density has fallen sharply
[[link removed]] in
the last 40 years, from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 10.1 percent in 2022.
At the same time, the last several years have seen an upsurge in labor
militancy that few would have predicted in 1996. Members of the
150,000-member United Auto Workers are, as of this writing and for the
first time in the union’s 88-year history, on strike
[[link removed]] at
all of the Big Three automakers.

President Joe Biden, who calls himself
[[link removed]] the
“most pro-union” president in history, recently joined them; it
was the first time
[[link removed]] a
sitting U.S. president has ever joined workers on a picket line. The
Writers Guild of America, which had been on strike since May,
recently won a contract
[[link removed]] that
met much of its demands. Union negotiators knew a less than
exceptional deal was “not going to fly” with a “younger, more
active, possibly more radical” membership, a TV writer told
[[link removed]] _The
New York Times._ SAG-AFTRA, which represents approximately 160,000
actors and performers, has been striking since mid-July. A UPS strike
was narrowly averted in August; the credible threat of one yielded
substantial gains
[[link removed]] for
workers. Kaiser Permanente health care workers won
[[link removed]] what
amounted to 21 percent in wage increases over the next four years in
early October, after more than 75,000 of them
[[link removed].] staged
a three-day strike
[[link removed]] in
four states.

New organizing campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon have also generated a
great deal of excitement. Since a store in Buffalo, New York, became
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first U.S. Starbucks to unionize in 2021, more than 350 stores across
the country have followed suit
[[link removed]].
But the company has steadfastly refused
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negotiate, and, two years after the first store voted to unionize, no
Starbucks location is operating under a union contract.

Unionization efforts at Amazon have hit similar stumbling blocks.
Staten Island warehouse workers led the first successful union drive
at a U.S. Amazon location in 2022. In the face of a
multimillion-dollar union-busting campaign, and initially without the
support of larger, more established unions, they won what _The New
York Times_ called “one of the biggest victories for organized
labor in a generation.” More than a year after that vote, Amazon is
still refusing to negotiate a contract.

In the last eight years, a new U.S. left
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that is distinct from and more progressive than the Democratic Party,
but which often works to elect candidates running on the Democratic
line—has emerged. This left has driven and benefited from the
upsurge in labor organizing. Nikhil Goyal, a former Bernie Sanders
senior policy adviser and author of _Live to See the Day,_ said at a
recent book event that revitalizing the labor movement was crucial to
making progress on any other front—a common theme on the left since
2015, thanks in large part to Sanders’s presidential campaigns and
supporters, who’ve gone on to found organizations like Sunrise, the
climate justice group that helped popularize the Green New Deal and
link the labor movement with the cause of climate justice.

The Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am a member, has
also made inroads
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organized labor since 2016. But the organization is still relatively
new to having and wielding power, and some in labor still view it
with suspicion
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“In New York City, it’s really tough,” said Zyad Hammad, who
organizes with NYC-DSA’s labor branch, “because the connection
between the Democratic Party and major unions is so strong here that
DSA is seen as a threat to the Democratic Party machine and their
power structure and the way things are done in New York politics.”

Large labor organizations still tend to back
Democrats—including centrists
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track records on labor
[[link removed]]—and union
households still tend to vote Democratic. But Democrats’ share of
those votes has mostly shrunk
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20 years. The fraying relationship between organized labor and the
Democratic Party
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coupled with the rise of new groups and voting blocs to the left of
the party, have prompted some in labor to consider whether it’s
better to maintain ties with established but unreliable partners or
join newly emboldened groups in carving out alternative paths to
power.

New York’s ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo spent years recruiting
[[link removed]] labor
leaders to join his vendetta against the left-leaning Working Families
Party. He persuaded a number of unions to withdraw from the New York
WFP in 2014, when the party considered backing his primary challenger
Zephyr Teachout. The WFP ultimately backed Cuomo, who
promptly reneged
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every promise he made to secure its endorsement. When the party backed
Cynthia Nixon over Cuomo in the 2018 primary, more unions left. Asked
about the divide those departures revealed, Sandra Oxford, the former
executive director of the Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation, said
that, speaking only as a WFP state officer, she wouldn’t call it a
divide: “It’s been more of a marriage, and it has not always been
a harmonious marriage.”

Ultimately these schisms freed the WFP to grow into a more unified and
disciplined organization that has survived Cuomo’s attacks, helped
put progressives like New York state Attorney General Letitia James in
powerful positions, and moved left
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But the question remains: Now that labor and the left are thriving
anew on parallel paths, will they come together to maximize their
power?

This used to be a simpler question to answer. Many of America’s most
effective labor leaders were socialists, from Mother Jones to Eugene
Debs to A. Philip Randolph. But in the first half of the twentieth
century, red scares drove leftists
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of labor leadership
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rendering it less confrontational and more transactional. “Labor
movements across the world have succeeded generally when they’ve had
strong unions in alliance with strong working-class political
parties,” said Eric Blanc, author and assistant professor of labor
studies at Rutgers University. The trouble in the United States, he
added, is that there’s never been a mass working-class party, which
helps explain divisions within the working class.

Driving leadership to the right helped feed a stereotype of union
members as blue-collar, “hard-working Americans, white Americans
[[link removed]]”
whose values, interests, and experiences are at odds with those of
people of color, women, and LGBTQ folks. But the U.S. labor movement
has always been diverse. Today it includes many more workers in
female-dominated sectors like teaching, health care, flight staff,
retail, and hospitality work. Black workers are more likely to belong
to unions [[link removed]] than
white, Asian, or Hispanic workers. Women in unions experience smaller
gender-based pay gaps
[[link removed].] than
their nonunion counterparts. Immigrants have led, powered, and gained
[[link removed]] from efforts
to organize
[[link removed]] the
multiracial working class. The narrow “wokeness” of academic and
corporate culture can and often does alienate working-class people
regardless of race and gender. And as conditions for workers of all
stripes continue to deteriorate, the appeal of broadsides against
corporate greed and demands for economic and social justice has grown.

The diversity of America’s working class is a strength, but it’s
also an opportunity for exploitation. Divisions among workers—real,
perceived, and imposed
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made segments of labor vulnerable to the right
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Today’s Republicans have three main strategies: pit union members
against leadership, workers against climate activists, and the U.S.
against China.

As GOP Senator Josh Hawley recently wrote
[[link removed]] on X,
“Auto workers deserve a raise—and they deserve to have their jobs
protected from Joe Biden’s stupid climate mandates that are
destroying the US auto industry and making China rich.” In Ohio,
Senator J.D. Vance said
[[link removed]] he’s
“rooting for the auto workers across our country demanding higher
wages and an end to political leadership’s green war on their
industry.” Trump told
[[link removed]] NBC’s _Meet
the Press_ that autoworkers were “being sold down the river by
their leadership.” Corporate executives have also sought to paint
union demands
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incompatible with progressive climate policy.

While Wuchinich dismissed the notion that workers and climate
activists have competing interests, she offered that it was imperative
to put “real thought” into efforts to bring climate and other
progressive activists into deeper alignment with labor. In the broader
environmental movement, she said, there can be “lip service” paid
to the people who are doing the work and the need for a “just
transition,” as opposed to the kind of “true engagement”
that’s required. When groups like Sunrise talk about a “just
transition,” the phrase rings hollow to many union members. “When
workers hear that we’re going to have a ‘just transition,’ they
know that means they’re going to get fucked,” Philadelphia
organizer Amanda McIllmurray told me in 2020.

Structural differences between unions and nonprofits drive some of
these tensions. Unions have a mandate to serve their members, and,
unlike left-leaning nonprofits, their members often have a variety of
political views, making it difficult to take potentially controversial
stands without alienating some of them. Some unions are more
democratically run than others, but union members elect their
officers, whereas nonprofits are run by unelected boards and
executives. People join leftist organizations out of ideological
conviction. They typically join unions to secure better pay, benefits,
and working conditions.

One key to bringing these groups back into alignment is to bring class
consciousness back to the labor movement. Labor actions provide
organic opportunities for an understanding of class and solidarity to
take root. “I wanted dental insurance; I wanted to earn more than
just $30,000; but most of all, I wanted a workplace where I wasn’t
treated like shit,” Aparna Gopalan wrote in a recent _Jewish
Currents_ newsletter, describing what motivated her to go on strike
for the first time as a graduate instructor. On the picket line, she
found that she and her co-workers “had all come out for the same
reasons—to win better pay, benefits, and harassment protections.”
But as the strike wore on, “something changed.” They had initially
walked off the job for practical reasons, but they “stayed on the
line for more ineffable ones.”

When feelings of solidarity, agency, and collective power begin to
emerge, they can break down political divides. The wave of teachers’
strikes that erupted in Republican-controlled states in 2018 drew
thousands of participants and supporters, including many who were not
leftists, unionists, or Democrats. A survey conducted
[[link removed]] by
Columbia University sociologists in the six states where teachers
walked out in 2018 found that the strikes changed attitudes,
particularly among “conservatives, Republicans, and those without
personal experience with unions.” Not only did they appear to
establish “a greater sense of common fate” between parents and
teachers; they also increased people’s interest in labor action, if
not necessarily traditional union membership. “The concrete
manifestation [of unity] for the left and for labor is trying to unite
those who sell their labor against those who own the companies,”
said Blanc.

Striking displays of left-labor unity erupted during Bill Clinton’s
second term and Obama’s first, political eras in which both
constituencies were marginalized. Clinton angered unions by punting
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efforts to strengthen labor laws and dismissing their concerns
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Nafta. With the notable exception of Occupy, the Obama years followed
this path. Obama allowed card-check legislation to languish
[[link removed]] after campaigning
on passing it
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to intervene
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then-Governor Scott Walker declared war on unions in Wisconsin,
and subjected
[[link removed]] union
health plans to new taxes and mandates under Obamacare. He wasn’t
much friendlier to the left, bemoaning
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“excesses” and accusing
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“want[ing] to take their ball and go home.”

Obama’s indifference spurred unions to seek ways to build power
outside of Washington. Unions provided key logistical support to
Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the Seattle anti–World Trade
Organization protests
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1999. During Occupy, Teamsters marched alongside
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who disrupted Sotheby’s auctions
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solidarity with the art handlers’ union the company locked out
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Leaders in both camps “say the relationship is sensitive,” _The
Washington Post_ reported
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the time, adding that Occupy activists had vowed to “reject any
efforts by union officials to draw the new movement into the
get-out-the-vote efforts that labor wages in election campaigns.” A
decade earlier, the _Los Angeles Times _ran a story (“Teamsters
and Turtles: They’re Together at Last”) that described
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of thousands of demonstrators—husky red-jacketed steelworkers
marching alongside costumed sea turtle impersonators,
environmentalists and miners, human rights activists and family
farmers” against the WTO.

The left and labor are, in many ways, stronger today. “The vast
majority of people in this country know that they are getting the
short end of the economic stick and are angry about it,” said
Wuchinich. In 2022, the largest percentage of Americans since
1965 approved of labor unions
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Large majorities of Democrats and sizable proportions of
Republicans supported
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recent strike wave. Campaigns at Starbucks, as well as at media
outlets, museums, and large public universities
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the writer Alissa Quart calls
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turtleneck” strikes—have brought youth, energy, and militancy back
to the labor movement. People “in certain more highly educated,
professionalized groups, for whom there are higher economic
expectations, who have graduated college expecting a particular career
and a particular income” are, Wuchinich said, “now realizing they
are also getting screwed.” And recent campaigns have forged new
bonds between blue collars and black turtlenecks, uniting them around
a shared identity as union members and breaking down some of the
hierarchical divisions that can undermine solidarity. In recent years,
we’ve seen parents support
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teachers and students fight
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by side, and writers and janitors join forces
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Organized labor and left-leaning groups have won key victories for
workers by electing Democratic majorities in states with large
concentrations of union members. As part of a coalition of community,
labor, and civil rights groups, unions helped Democrats win back
control
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the Michigan legislature in 2022. Michigan subsequently became the
first state in 58 years to repeal
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anti-union “right-to-work” law. Minnesota Democrats
recently passed one of the most pro-worker legislative packages
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decades, guaranteeing paid family and medical leave, barring companies
from holding mandatory anti-union meetings, and strengthening
protections for meatpacking and Amazon warehouse workers.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats have passed bills
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the state House to raise the minimum wage and enshrine the right to
collective bargaining in the state constitution. They were able to do
so in part because DSA and the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO joined forces
to elect
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like Representative Elizabeth Fiedler; unions, teachers, and
pro-choice groups also came together to back
[[link removed]] Representative
Lindsay Powell. What Maurice Mitchell, national director of the WFP,
called “the broader movement left” and labor also united to elect
Brandon Johnson mayor of Chicago and send Greg Casar of Texas to
Congress in 2022. Alexa Avilés, a New York City councilmember in
Brooklyn, won her 2021 race with strong support from unions, the WFP,
and DSA—thanks, she said, to a shared focus on prioritizing the
needs of “people over profit.”

The language left-leaning groups use today—people over profits,
workers over bosses, ordinary or working people over elites—has
clear antecedents in left-wing movements like Occupy and political
campaigns like Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs. Now a number of
prominent labor leaders have adopted this language as well, signaling
a return to labor’s radical roots. The UAW’s Shawn Fain
has described
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autoworkers’ strike as a struggle between the “billionaire
class” and the “working class”; Stacy Davis Gates, who heads the
Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, recently vowed
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prioritize “the voices of the many” by fighting “tooth and
nail” to ensure
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supporters of school choice and privatization do not infect
Chicago’s board of education with “fascism and racism”; and Sara
Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight
Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, spoke
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2021 about the transformative power of having the legal standing, via
a union, to “make capital have to respond to working people.”

Thanks to the renewed vigor of each, the left and labor are now on the
cusp of forging a more durable alliance. Olivia Killingsworth, a DSA
organizer and SAG-AFTRA member, said it’s been heartening to see how
coordinated and supportive of each other’s campaigns New York City
unions have been, “from the bottom to the top.” More tempered in
his read of the landscape was Jesse Sharkey, former president of the
CTU. He acknowledged some “bright spots” but said that overall, he
doesn’t see “the kind of risk taking and confrontation with
capital that we’re going to need in order to win.” Meanwhile,
Wuchinich believes that labor’s biggest opportunity to build power
lies in bringing more people into the movement. “We build real power
when people make the decision to stand up and fight their bosses,”
she said, and when they “expect more from themselves than the rest
of the world has been expecting from them.”

In September, I joined a WGA/SAG-AFTRA picket in midtown Manhattan. It
was pouring rain, but the dozen or so people who’d shown up anyway
were in good spirits. Killingsworth, who was one of the organizers,
spotted an older man across the street. “Murray!” she shouted,
beckoning him over. As he came into view, I realized he was the actor
F. Murray Abraham. When he heard I was writing about labor, he turned
his intense gaze on me. “Without unions,” he intoned, “there is
no middle class. And without a middle class, there is no democracy.”
These are long-standing, time-tested sentiments; what’s new is the
once-in-a-generation opportunity to unite different groups around our
fundamental shared interests.

_[RAINA LIPSITZ has written about gender, politics, and culture for a
variety of publications. She is the author of The Rise of a New Left:
How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics
[[link removed]].
@RainaLips [[link removed]]]_

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